Saturday, March 03, 2007

Miles Davis - Tales Of New York

By late 1958, Davis employed one of the best and most profitable working bands pursuing the hard bop style, his personnel stabilized to alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Wynton Kelly, long-serving bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. His band played a mixture of pop standards and bebop originals by the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron; as with all bebop-based jazz, Davis's groups improvised on the chord changes of a given song.However, Davis was one of many jazz musicians growing dissatisfied with bebop, seeing its increasingly complex chord changes as hindering creativity. In 1953, pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of Western music, Russell invented a new formulation using scales or a series of scales for improvisations; this approach came to be known as modal in jazz.Influenced by Russell's ideas, Davis implemented his first modal composition with the title track of his 1958 album Milestones; satisfied with the results, Davis now prepared an entire album based on modality. Pianist Bill Evans, also an enthusiast of Russell, but recently departed from the Davis band to pursue his own career. Davis successfully drafted Evans into his new recording project, the sessions that would become Kind of Blue.